My life as a Missionary in the Santiago East, Chile Mission

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June 24, 2014 (Week 3)

The pool house where I sleep with my two companions and our other room mates.

The Alcantara

Santiago is a weird place. The CCM is actually in my mission, so I´m getting a preview right now of what it´s going to be like in la campa. Lot´s of fences. If you judged the people based on the fences, you´d think the people here were totally mean. They are all at least 6 feet tall, some as high as 15, and all of them have giant spikes on the top, up to 6 inches in some cases. Some of them have electric wire on the top and it´s not uncommon to see cameras around. It´s like no one wants to talk to each other.

We ran to the tallest building in Santiago. That was pretty cool. You were right, there is a lot of strays. Two of them followed us all the way there, then all the way home to Alcantara. One of them was this stupid thing that ran in traffic to bark at cars. There was also a lot of very brave pedestrians, like you said.

I don´t know if you got into the mall under that building, but I´d suggest you do. It cool, lots of good shops, but it´s also probably the tallest mall I´ve ever been in. I think it was 7 stories tall and probably 200 feet to the bottom from top floor. Quite the place.

My language is coming along. I am speaking hard core spanglish, but I can understand most of what is being said, despite Chilean Spanish being some of the fastest in South America. I was reading my patriarchal blessing, and I saw that it said I have the gift for interpreting tongues. Kind of cool. It actually said a lot about my mission in my blessing, and it was very specific.

I have made friends with the group older than me, and we play this game they call naranja, which is orange in Spanish. Basically, we throw an orange at each other in weird ways until it falls apart and sprays juice everywhere. It sound stupid, but we laugh ourselves silly playing it. Just imagine a bunch of Latinos yelling Orange! as they throw an orange around a room, and you can see why we laugh so hard. Also, when you are so bored you could almost crawl out of your own skin, anything is way funnier than it should be.

Elder Mathewson

The Old Mall, which was kind of a cool looking building. We are going to the new mall today.